BECAUSE I'VE BECOME AWARE OF

BECAUSE I’VE BECOME AWARE OF

Because I’ve become aware of what my cells knew

three and a half billion years ago does that make me

wise and sonorous? Some days I’m a ripe apple

in a big-hearted sunset basking in my red shifting shadows,

and whatever’s spiritual about me, it seems,

though I’ve never been able to put my finger on it,

lingers like a warm buzz of animal contentment

as if life and time were the synonymous friends

of a tranquil atmosphere where just to be here as it is, right now, this

sense that everything, suffering and the bliss of insight alike

had already been wholly achieved billions of years ago

and we’re just remembering our way into the future again

without going anywhere because nothing’s left out.

How can the magic circles of the dreams we draw in the rain

like the geometry of water, ever be over if they

never had a beginning when not having a beginning

doesn’t mean you don’t exist? Inconceivably

from all appearances. The powder blue damselfly

a mascara pencil on the eyelid of the larkspur

with a white star instead of a moondog for an iris.

And then something you once loved in your own

peculiar way, makes you cry and eternity breaks the circle

like a cosmic egg you’re trying to fly out of

and you look at time and change and passage

as you wash a gust of molecules like gold dust

to rinse the dazzling blindness out of your eyes in tears

at not knowing where they’ve gone. Some died.

Do they live on? Some just drifted away like smoke

from the wick of the candle they used to dance upon

in the upwelling of the flame that melted it down.

Hunger first. Then desire. Then suffering. It’s more

the compassion of the poet in me that says that

than it is the Buddhist heretic. Evolution eats itself

to transcend death as fast as possible creatively.

Nothing else to compare it with you can’t says it’s wrong

though you’re troubled by the rightness of it,

and though we do, it’s still fearful to cherish what

seems so randomly expendable like the strawdog

of a work of genius you throw on the fire as soon

as you’ve finished with it. Who is being worshipped

that so many have to die like feted sacrifices

to a hunger that devours the galaxies like starfish?

Infinite appetite at a bone dance that knows the music stops

when it does. Witness the euphoria of the crazed book of life

in the Burgess Shale, pressed like a flower between

the pages and pages of time without a narrative theme

it’s left to us to make up sitting around like solar systems

the boundary stones of the fires of our hearts, as if we

we’re the ones telling the story, not anxiously listening to it.

The desperate and the damaged, the shell-shocked, maimed

and mutilated, no chivalry in the struggle for survival,

and even beauty, a snare it’s wise to be aware of,

all the mistakes a Hox gene can make, even poetry

the most resplendent delusion of my heart and art,

a way of whistling lullabies in the dark when you really need

your mother, consolation philosophies we’re addicted to

like the endorphins of our own creative imaginations

sweeter than any drug a junkie ever o.d.’d on. There’s

a big gap in the story we’re trying to cross on the bridge

of a burning guitar, a caesura the equal of anything on Mars.

And every cable of the way strung out like nerves and spinal cords

on the suspension of our belief in the totally believable extremes

we’re facing with affectionate daubs of starmud on our nose

trying to shine our way across on the liferafts of our eyebeams.

The Great Divide. Everyone standing on one bank of the abyss

calling out in the night to another not sure if they, or this,

or that bank even exists, of if things just go through the ice

and disappear for good. For worse. Or neither. Ingathered

or scattered, or the mindstream returning to its watershed,

or we just wash the starmud off our noses so thoroughly

the snowman gets thrown out with the bathwater, and there’s

just a carrot, six lumps of coal and two sticks to show for it

as we step off into our empty omnipresence like mirrors

into the tears of their own reflections, air out of the parachutes

that housed us like ants and bees in the daylilies.

Or as I’m doing now, the blindfold off. Looking

down the barrel of a firing squad of stars like a black hole

at the singularity of the one blank among so many bullets,

to see if it’s got our name on it, while the others go off

in a game of Russian roulette with the Leonids.

Vodka double. Straight up. Fire. Courage or suicide?

Definitely brutal in the eerie finality of the endless outcome

if you’ve got the eyes for it, falcons under the hood of your eclipse.

Or maybe nothing can be separated from the intelligence

that divined it in the first place like the surest sign

of evolution riding its inspiration out the way a star rides

its own light like the wavelength of a single thought

blossoming like a tiny blue flower throughout the universe.

PATRICK WHITE